Mellanox announced the expansion of its line of end-to-end FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect solutions with new 18-port, 108-port, 216-port, and 324-port non-blocking fixed and modular switches. The new SX6000 series switches support a superior scalable platform that scales as the number of nodes per cluster and the number of cores per node increases.

"As servers are deployed with next generation processors and PCIe 3.0, data center managers have an increased need for bandwidth, performance and density in their interconnect solutions," said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "These new switches were developed as high-speed smart solutions to meet customer demand, while providing unmatched scalability across storage, application and database servers."

The company also announced results of benchmarking tests and measurements performed by The Tolly Group on Mellanox’s SwitchX based Ethernet solutions. The benchmarking, utilizing industry-standard Ixia testing and validation solutions, demonstrated the industry-record performance and energy efficiency of Mellanox’s SwitchX Ethernet solutions. The SX1036 delivers wire-speed throughput running 36 ports of 40GbE, as well as when running 48 ports of 10GbE along with 12 ports of 40GbE with cut through latency less than 223ns for L2 40GbE and 269ns for L2 10GbE.

Mellanox RDMA technology for InfiniBand, supported in Windows Server 2012, was also benchmarked and results performed by Mellanox, Microsoft and Fusion-io delivered more than 5X faster application performance boost compared to 10GbE solutions. Mellanox’s RDMA-based interconnect technologies include the FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 40GbE with RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) interconnect products.

“A highlight of Windows Server 2012 is its great improvement in storage performance, as demonstrated by the preliminary benchmark results that SMB Direct has achieved,” said Mike Schutz, Senior Director, Windows Server and Virtualization, at Microsoft. “With this new technology, customers can access storage over the network at the speed of local storage. As a result, a virtualized server infrastructure can utilize shared JBOD storage through the use of RDMA-enabled network interface cards (RNICs). This approach significantly increases data center efficiency.”

Mellanox and Eucalyptus collaborate

Mellanox and Eucalyptus Systems announced that the two companies have established a strategic partnership program to further accelerate and foster adoption of efficient, high-performance cloud infrastructures. The partnership combines Eucalyptus software platform for on-premise IaaS clouds and Mellanox 10/40GbE and InfiniBand portfolio of adapters, switches and gateways.

“This collaboration underscores Eucalyptus' commitment to organizations that are building powerful, flexible private and hybrid clouds using existing enterprise IT infrastructure and software,” said David P. Butler, senior vice president of marketing at Eucalyptus Systems. “The combination of Eucalyptus’ software platform and Mellanox 40GbE and InfiniBand interconnects, will provide enterprises an easy out-of-the-box installation experience while gaining a high-performance, affordable cloud solution.”

Mellanox and AMAX showcase Hadoop Appliance

Mellanox announced the joint demonstration of PHAT-DATA40G, a high-performance Hadoop appliance over a Mellanox end-to-end 40GbE solution during Interop 2012. PHAT-DATA40G is a complete Hadoop solution of computation, networking, disk drives and installation and management tools and is distributed through AMAX Information Technologies. Using Terasort, PHAT-DATA40G is able to sort a 1TB dataset in less than 27 minutes using only 5 machines; 20 percent faster than previously possible.

“PHAT-DATA40G is a collaborative effort with industry technology leaders to build the highest-performing Hadoop solution running on optimized hardware, with ease of use and simplified deployment as a shared vision,” said Jean Shih, President, AMAX. “Data is gold if it’s organized and analyzed correctly, and in highly competitive markets, this translates into reaching more revenue faster and on a larger scale, yet with precise incision. PHAT-DATA40G powers Hadoop with the most powerful and user-friendly engine on the market for this very goal, to give companies a real competitive edge quickly and dynamically using data-driven business intelligence.”